Spreading Excitement About Space Exploration

The long-overdue retirement of the aging Space Shuttle program two years ago received a great deal of media coverage. This has led some people (including, to my distress, one of my daughter's high school teachers) to erroneously conclude that NASA no longer exists.

In fact, while NASA's budget today is less than half of its 1966 peak, the US space agency is possibly engaged in more missions now than at any other time in its history.

As I write this, five men and one woman are orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station. The Curiosity rover just completed its first year on Mars, and is on its way to the base of a three-mile-high Martian peak, where it will delve into the planet's geological past. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006, is more than halfway on its 3 billion mile journey to Pluto. Meanwhile, the Cassini probe continues to explore Saturn and its moons. And the data from the Kepler space telescope, currently under repair after exceeding its initial planned lifetime, is being analyzed to discover planets around other suns, well over a hundred of which have been found so far. These are just a few of the exciting missions NASA is carrying out.

Yet it's commonplace to hear engineers lament the small size of the NASA budget, the lack of a successor to the Space Shuttle, the lack of a US heavy launch vehicle, and the fact that no human being has left Earth's orbit since December 1972. The present state of the US space program is contrasted with the "good old days" of the Apollo program. The conclusion is almost always that NASA today is a pale shadow of what it once was.

While I share in the admiration for the achievements of the early days of the US space program, and in the desire to see greater progress in human space exploration, I think that a pessimistic attitude is both misguided and counterproductive. Not only will such an attitude fail to encourage legislators to invest more heavily in space exploration, but -- more importantly -- it will fail to inspire our children to dream about space. In short, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most engineers are savvy enough to know that if you want to ask your manager for more resources for a project, complaining about your inability to meet your objectives is not a good strategy. Instead, you should show the results you have already achieved, and how much more could you achieve with greater resources.

Similarly, legislators are unlikely to support the space program if they are led to believe that it is only a dying relic of the Cold War past. No politician wants to be associated with a lost cause, and after bailing out the financial and automotive industries, another "bailout" is unlikely to be a winning political proposition. Instead, legislators need to understand that the space program is vital, exciting, and is doing incredible things.

Most importantly, we need to teach young people to have an optimistic view of the future of human space exploration. That means looking forward, rather than looking back nostalgically at the space program's past. We owe our children a positive vision that will inspire their imaginations. After all, they are the ones whose hard work, study, creativity, and determination will lead humanity on its next adventure.

Dave, I share your enthusiasm for space. Unfortunately, in my experience, these projects take too long to engage most people. I worked on the ISS design in the 1980s. Some of my co-workers worked on it in the 1970s. When did it launch? I guarntee you that there is not much different from those 1980 designs. The whole race to the moon took less than a decade.

Much of the cost of a space project is engineering. We have had a heavy launch vehicle. It was called the Saturn V. My understanding is that the tooling and designs were not kept after the use of the system. So, when the Shuttle had problems, we had no alternative, just the situation we are in now. This is the big issue with the Space Program. We always have to be doing something new, rather than supporting a goal in a cost effective manner. You will have trouble getting people interested in working on it or funding it until there are goals with reasonable timeframes.

What makes this movie stand out from the typical high school sports story is that the teenagers are undocumented immigrants, and the big game is a NASA-sponsored marine robotics competition. Like many other Hollywood movies, however, Spare Parts only tells part of the story. What the film shows -- and doesn’t show -- raises important issues affecting STEM education in the US.

A program to educate kids about the science and technology of plastics as well how they can have future careers in the field has received a $200,000 funding boost from the National Plastics Center to expand

Lots of kids enjoy playing with toy race cars, and some may even dream of being race car drivers when they grow up. NASCAR is taking inspiration from this interest with the launch of an in-school and online learning platform for STEM education, the first ever from the sport of racing.

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